Booting…

“Small minds discuss people. Average minds discuss events. Great minds discuss ideas.”

– ???

This was one of the many scrawlings on my bedroom wall while I was a student. Long before I moved in, visitors had been contributing proclamations, sentiments, and doodles, all over the room’s interior, but this one stood out. At the time, I probably dismissed the claim as rather pompous, but it stuck with me (If it was an idea worth discussing, who was I to disagree with the ‘great mind’ that suggested it?). I can’t attribute the quote to anyone in particular but it set the standard for many beer-garden conversations that followed, and spawned a strange, jarring realisation in me. Let’s discuss this idea together, if only to help our minds feel great!

Before I tell you what my realisation was, we should agree from the outset; It’s highly unlikely that ‘conscious awareness’ just appeared on Earth one day, fully-formed. Chances are slim that some unconscious reptile or fish gave birth to conscious offspring – understandably surprised and confused! Instead, life’s conscious awareness must have followed a smooth transition, over millennia, from earlier kinds of lived experience. You can’t decorate a cake before you’ve baked it!

Just as a wide spectrum of senses and sensitivities exist in the natural world, so a progression of emotional depth must have emerged over time too (see here). Because of this, it’s plausible that ‘sentience’ – sensing and responding to the environmental – is different to anything else ‘consciousness’ might entail, and must have come much earlier. I’ve heard consciousness described as originating from a kind of perceptual white noise – like the gradual tuning of a TV from static interference. This is pleasing to think about, but probably inaccurate. So how might subjective experience realistically emerge from basic sensory input? The answer, I suspect, lies within.

The most ancient animals on Earth, without any brains at all, would still need to monitor themselves for physical damage, hunger, thirst, lack of oxygen, extremes of temperature, etc. These bodily conditions don’t need to be conscious to be felt. When an organism feels something – let’s say ‘pain’ – automatic chemical systems wave flags and sound alarms. The chemicals released ARE ‘the feeling’ that things need to change – Both are one and the same thing. But feelings like this predate animals. A simple stimulus-response feedback loop is all that’s needed for life to be considered sentient. The environment pokes, internal chemistry flows, things flinch. The effect is sensational! (sorry)

“I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception”

– David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

Thanks Hume. Now, speaking as a blind, deaf, pre-Cambrian blob; sensing the environment in order to move towards or away from something creates a catch-22. While moving, how can I distinguish changes in the environment from changes caused by my own actions? Did the poking stop because I moved, or did the pokey thing go away? Organisms as basic as bacteria can sense the world and respond to changes, though they’d be quick to admit; bacterial responses are involuntary and inflexible. Plants, in contrast, are far more complex! Being multi-cellular, plants boast a rich sensitivity to damage, light direction and intensity, food availability, and airborne chemicals (plants are amazing). But they cannot move. As a kingdom, plants can be pretty sure that if something changes, it wasn’t their fault. Sure they can react, but not in ways that demand a breaking news feed. Bacteria can move, but their limited repertoire of behaviours don’t risk sensory confusion. Without optional or immediate reflexes, consciousness would be wasted on these lifeforms!

So a creature’s perceptions and actions must evolve together to grant any benefit. For single cells to cooperate with each other en masse, chemical signals must be contained within multi-cellular clumps. Internalising cell-to-cell chit-chat taught these ‘collective individuals’ a couple of useful tricks. First, cells for detecting could coordinate with cells for moving. Second, distant cells could synchronise, producing well-timed, powerful actions! Early inter-departmental issues must have been rife. Tired of administrative inefficiency, new kinds of cells would eventually dedicate themselves to passing messages throughout the larger organism. And just like that – over an eon or so – the nervous system was born!

With great new abilities come great new problems. What an animal will do next depends on what it senses now. This ‘sensory-motor arc’, as it’s called, can be finely-tuned as it takes place within the body. What an animal will sense next depends on what it does now. The ‘motor-sensory arc’ extends out into the world, incurring in a relative loss of control. Sentience, some say, lies in the difference between these two streams of experience.

Fun fact: When pit against each other, sensing and acting start to affect how things feel. Ever get sick on a rocking boat or while reading in a car? That’s the ears saying “Hey, we’re moving!” and the eyes responding “Err, no we’re not!” In our ancestral past, chemical disagreements between senses were likely due to food poisoning. A sensible precautionary measure; purge the stomach!

The more animals could do, the more valuable it became to get fast and accurate updates from the senses. Superman couldn’t catch that speeding bullet if his eyes couldn’t track it. Watching a bullet fly towards him would be useless if he was too slow to dodge it! Our muscles had to co-evolve, not just with improved spatial awareness, but rapid information processing too. To do this, nerve cells clustered around the sense organs like traders at a stock market. Dense congregations of neurons gave rise to the first animal brains, and that’s still all brains are today; bundles of neurons exchanging information. Still, somewhere along the way animals had to exert some serious top-down control over their behaviours. To better manage self-produced environmental changes, brains use ‘efference copies’. This would have been a major cognitive milestone!

I’ve just been told; my building wants to test it’s fire alarms. An internal email explains what’s about to happen to avoid mass panic. In a joyfully similar way, brains can send duplicate messages to both the muscles and sensory neurons. This tells the muscles what to do and the senses what to expect. Almost as a side-effect, efference copies create a distinction between what is ‘me’ – the extent of my body and its influence – and what is ‘not me’. Any animal that can move must be able to make this distinction, from worms to fish to primates, but there’s no need to share every bit of information between neurons.

It makes sense to assign specific tasks to different parts of the brain. No single athlete can be expected to excel in all Olympic events! Keeping things separate allows for specialisation. In fact, most animal brains don’t even combine information from each eye! What seems like an oversight allows each eye – and even different patches within each eye – to excel at detecting food or predators or mates. Suddenly, asking what another creature ‘sees’ or ‘feels’ is meaningless. Unless the organism can create a unified representation of the world, blending all their senses together – as we do – what life feels like from their perspective is inconceivable!

On this note; another mistake is to project our human feelings onto other animals. Just as most bodily functions can be maintained without conscious supervision, many sensory arcs operate in silence as far as the creature’s experience is concerned. Ignoring my own advice, I’d guess that to be a jellyfish probably feels the way it does to be your own liver. Human perceptions draw on cognitive tweaks other animals simply don’t possess. Does this mean that only humans can suffer, emotionally and physically, and that our moral concerns shouldn’t include other life forms? ABSOLUTELY NOT! If your liver ruptured I’m sure you’d notice it – not everything that an animal can feel has to be conscious.

Most of your body operates beyond control or perception, at least until there’s a problem. With no need to change internal conditions, conscious awareness offers no particular advantage. The same is true for mental processes. Despite being oblivious to the majority of our brain’s affairs, humans have been shown to react emotionally to stimuli too brief to register consciously. Consciousness, therefore, may have revamped our experience of the world but it’s not the only kind of experience there is. Reminders come when you’re shivering in the cold, holding your breath, or standing on a lego brick with bare feet! Primordial emotions plough through our sophisticated self-awareness! They dominate all other perceptions and cannot be ignored! Evidently animals were feeling pain, hunger, and fear, long before our mammalian subjectivity came strolling along.

So what do we get for lumping our senses together, like the universal athletes we are? Turns out; oodles! Combining information to paint a single coherent picture creates a virtual ‘inner-model’ of the world around us! This is not one impression after another; more a soupy mixture of sight, sound, touch, and smell. Time stirs the pot, transforming one moment into another, giving us a deeper sense of where we are and how objects might be manipulated. This mental representation of reality is profoundly useful when trying new things, memorising complicated procedures, or connecting events in time. For sure, the lives of most creatures are stressful enough without these extra steps, but living in two worlds simultaneously allows us to experiment!

The room stays still when you tilt your head, or at least it should. Try it, for science. Efference copies resolve that ancient stand-off; “What is going on?” Vs “What am I doing?” Is that sound getting louder or am I moving closer to it? Am I talking, or is someone talking to me? Cc-ing instructions to different parts of the body produces a fixed and stable environment, but what happens if we compensate our vision without instructing any muscles? This deliberate miscommunication gives us a ‘mind’s eye’!

Look at something across the room. Use your imagination to pick it up, rotate it in the air. What does it look like underneath? Now pretend a dinosaur comes stomping through the scene, goring people with its claws and teeth. I bet you can play “somewhere over the rainbow” in your head while you witness this carnage! Layers on layers. Some real, some simulated. How do people ever get bored?

Hijacking efference not only gives us inner-thoughts and images, but also language. Planning to say things, without instructing to the mouth or vocal folds, gives rise to an inner-voice! How different our experience of the world would be without that! By forfeiting the opportunity to partition our senses and optimising their roles, we could broadcast integrated information across the entire brain and acquire some awesome perceptual powers! With inner-speech and sight we can generate complex ideas, manipulate them, project the likely consequences of our actions inside a safe virtual world. What’s more, we can have thoughts about our thoughts, ask ourselves why we feel the way we do, and exercise self-control! Well, some can. Humans each carry a mental sandbox for free, private investigations. Enjoy it.

“A long and complex train of thought can no more be carried on without the aid of words, whether spoken or silent, than a long calculation without the use of figures or algebra”

– Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

As usual, great complexity creates great confusion. Plying our perceptions with fake news exposes us to cognitive biases, self-deception, and delusion. These are a standard features of human life. But so is chaos. By deliberately manipulating my surroundings, I can make changes now to act on them later. Think of an ant laying scent trails to find its way home. It alters its environment in the present to guide its behaviour in the future! By fridging a to-do list in the morning, we can ruin the afternoon! In a very real way, scent marks and post-it notes become a form of external memory. Like regular communication, but between time-lapsed versions of yourself rather than between individuals. And unlike an inner-monologue, these communications are publicly available; they can be accidentally or intentionally intercepted.

This brings me, finally, to my realisation! Those anonymous words on my bedroom wall sent me down a rabbit hole of thinking. They altered my behaviour, consciously or unconsciously, and began an incremental change in my life. When nervous systems evolved, cells could share information and coordinate actions at a distance. Today our perceptions are awash with messages left by other people. The environment itself has been re-purposed to broadcast information and steer human actions. Instead of trying to determine what isn’t caused by us, we have become dependent on information left deliberately by others. The visual, audible, and written media produced by humanity has introduced a collective, intra-subjective, external nervous system louder than reality itself!

Most people probably haven’t encountered the phrase ‘to lift oneself by the bootstraps’. It’s a little dated. Bootstraps are loops of material for pulling your boots on. Lifting yourself off the ground this way is comically impossible. A shortened version of the expression is still used, however, when we ‘boot-up’ a computer. Bootstrapping has also been invoked to illustrate the futility of a conscious mind attempting to analyse itself. Even so, I try to pull myself up by the bootstraps every day! Without introspection would we be conscious at all?

Before checking-out of my student accommodation, I felt compelled to jot an additional grandiose claim on the communal wall. I wonder if it’s changed anyone’s life.

“The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriousity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is”

– Stephen Fry